The Long Game
by randolhllee
Summary: A representation of Root's development over the course of the show. The first chapter is set during Root Cause (1.13), and subsequent chapters will go from there. More about her past life, motivations, and actions will be explored, as well as Root-centric takes on key episodes and events. Hopefully the actual fic is more interesting than this summary is making it sound :)
1. Chapter 1

I've finally gotten back to this fic! Basically, it'll be a Root-centric story that fills in what we don't get to see/know in the show. Right now, I'm intending it to be canon-compliant, so any deviations are unintentional unless otherwise noted. If you read the first chapter I posted back in December, I think it's now going to be Ch. 4, so it may be confusing for a couple weeks until I get Chs. 2 and 3 up. Please bear with me!

This chapter encompasses the events of "Root Cause" (1.13). I've tried to give enough information from the episode so that it's clear what Root is doing, but all the references will probably make more sense if you've seen the episode. Enjoy!

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><p>The woman with many names and an ever-changing face strode up to the plain dorm building, wheeling her smart black suitcase behind her. She wove smoothly between students rushing to shuffle their patchwork duffle bags into waiting caravans before the parking meters ran out, desperate to fall into familiar beds and let the semester's knowledge disappear under Christmas snowdrifts. She caught the door before it closed behind another teenager running mad to escape the so-called hallowed halls.<p>

A woman with a suitcase, even one in her thirties, did not attract much attention from the frantic students. One, however, did notice that the woman, though beautiful, seemed to be alone, withdrawn and inscrutable within her deep hood. Had she looked closer, she would have seen that the woman's sweatshirt was indeed of that university, but still had creases from the campus bookstore shelves; that she was not, in fact, attached or connected in any way to any of the retreating students; and that she avoided the steady gaze of the security cameras with the ease of someone who has planned to do exactly that. The student, however, noted only that the woman was a small anomaly in the painfully plain corridor before succumbing to the siren whisper of a home, two hours' drive in her future, in which she could sleep without alarm clocks. She was certainly long gone by the time the hooded woman exited the elevator on the fifth floor, located an empty room, and swiftly picked the lock before finally stepping inside and freeing her head and long, brown hair from the confines of the sweatshirt.

She smirked to herself. That was all the audience she ever needed.

Hours chased themselves down to tired nubs and returned to the room as puddling shadows casting themselves across the industrial carpet. They drifted past the woman working steadily at the wooden desk and fell into the grime-swiped cracks between the cramped room's institutional furnishings.

She had pushed the whimsical clutter of a teenage girl's attempt at stylish study methods to the floor. That leveled the space into a smooth plane, full of opportunity, upon which she could place the tools of her craft.

She had honed her talents until the intricate whorls and hauntingly beautiful veins of a beating system flowed from her hands in smooth strings of numbers and letters, a cat's-cradle of information spun between her fingertips. Over years, the spinning patterns grew in complexity, though they never outpaced her controlling touch. She had grown her playground into an empire over the years, but as its ruler, she and she alone played there.

The beating tattoo of her black-tipped fingers striking the keyboard formed the soundtrack to her work. With flicks of her fingers she spun a spiraling trail of hints and tiny lies down into the life of one bumbling being. A gun license here, a series of encrypted emails there, a search history to do a black-ops recruit proud scattered throughout. She was particularly pleased with the trojan program she had designed to be delivered by email. Nearly any fool could write a trojan, but it took an artist to create an elegant program. The best part was that the mark had installed the program himself when he replied to the email.

All these had been set up over the last months, of course, or dated in such a way as to seem so. These things took time, and she was a master of the long game.

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><p>The shadows had long since circled the room and settled in for the night when her phone buzzed.<p>

"Hello?" she answered sweetly.

"Is it ready?" a nervous voice rasped.

The honey in her voice did nothing to dull the edge it slashed through the air.

"It's been ready. We've discussed this before, you know," she reminded the Congressman's campaign manager with the air of a kindergarten teacher speaking to a particularly stubborn child.

"I just want to be sure," was the disgruntled reply. "I pay you enough for that, don't I?"

"You pay me enough to have me take care of your problems," she answered in a bored tone. "But you don't pay me enough to keep cleaning up when you create new ones. Like this call, for example."

The businessman turned frantic. "You said this was a secure line to call," he accused shakily.

"It is," she sighed. "But that just means that no one can find out _who_ you called. They'll still know you called an untraceable number, if they check."

"Fix it!" The order was a dying shudder of bravado and fraying nerves. Some people were just not built for this game.

She rolled her eyes and tapped her long fingers carelessly on the desk in a slow rhythm.

"Oh, I will," she drawled. "_Once_."

Then she hung up. The phone had not even stopped transcribing glinting circles on the desk when the plastic _tap_ of the keys once again slipped around the room.

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><p>She dozed periodically, both on the bed and in the strict desk chair; she ate irregularly whenever hunger overtook her malaise. She monitored the development of her strategy as a general from base, watching the far-off flashes that signal gun-fire. Soft <em>pings<em> interrupted her other projects, alerting her to the finding of the planted emails, the discovery of the gun permit, and everything else she had planned so meticulously. She could have placed a time-estimate on every alert, but betting against herself was pointlessly boring in the face of her certainty.

And then, a _ping_ she did not expect. A louder one, an alarm set long ago against a dim possibility.

She studied the screen for a moment before once again grinning. It seemed that there was a pretender to the throne of her kingdom. Of course, entering her empire of mirrors meant that one had to see the mirages coming.

The shadow system absorbed the intruder's search and pulled it into a dark hole to chase ghosts. Meanwhile, the hacker directed her attention to the information arriving on her screen in scrolling strings of code. Though it streamed by with the volume and force of an enormous river, she picked out several strings she had never seen before, and she had seen it all. Moreover, it carried within it an artistry and elegance that twined close to her own. It hardly matched the agitated voice she heard exclaiming, "they're listening to us right now, destroy your phone!" But then, she was so rarely what people expected either. It was really an advantage.

Even as her program unceremoniously kicked the errant thief out on his ear, she had become absorbed in the graceful and gripping numbers gleaned from the attacker's computer. Her lips curled into the irrepressible beam of a child absorbed in a new toy. _This _was far from boring.

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><p>Another call from the Congressman's campaign manager, now that her perfectly balanced strategy had been skewed by unpredictable variables. More threats, more pointed this time, and he backed off. Still, his call itched at the back of her throat.<p>

The issues he raised, though, were far from annoying; they were welcome. She sat up straight with renewed energy, typed with a force and purpose that had drifted away from her fingers in the last few years. She had forgotten that it was more fun to play with an equal, but now she remembered.

Her relocation was inconvenient, but not more than slightly irksome. It was not as if she had ever unpacked more than her equipment, nor left traces that would be of any help. She disappeared as she had come, a tall, faceless figure wheeling a suitcase down an empty hallway. And if the security video from those days were mysteriously and precisely corrupted, it was only a usual precaution.

The whole strategy was thrown off, but she swiftly constructed a new one. She tested it and its components for weaknesses, but found none. The objective had changed, of course; where before, she had been aiming to complete the job, now she was trying for closure on her part in it. The rest of the team she had arranged would have to fend for themselves, but then, it was their job to become the same color as the shadows. The client, on the other hand, was less… adaptable. He would have to be abandoned.

She tied the strings of that last job with neat flourishes of code and tactics from a quiet coffee shop in Queens; she was particularly proud of the suicide note. It was not easy to get these things right remotely, but she had chosen her disposable team as carefully as she chose any of her other tools. With a final tap, the last elements fell into place, leaving behind a smooth, impenetrable facade walling up all proof that she had ever been involved.

And then, as a reward, she opened a new window and sent the opening gambit for her newest game.

_Opening IRC Chat IP Port 96 on … user 'anonymous'_

_ HELLO_

_ FBI PAID ME A VISIT. GOOD THING I TRAVEL LIGHT..._

She typed with the same easy precision that characterized all her operations. The force, though, the power she held in her fingers, had been renewed by this intriguing adversary.

_ WHO ARE YOU?_

A very direct adversary, then. No finesse, no slow approach. She could still work with that.

_ MY NAME? I'VE HAD A FEW. YOU CAN CALL ME ROOT._

That was the proud appellation connected by whispers and conjecture to dozens of jobs she had completed, some with blood spilled and others mere money operations. All neat, though, airtight and perfect, like ships in glass bottles built of her wondrous manipulations.

_DID YOU KILL MATHESON?_

Her lips quirked at the question. It was imprecise, and therefore deserved an indirect answer.

_MATHESON WAS A CASUALTY OF HIS OWN WEAKNESS._

An involuntary muscle contraction flared her nostrils. Matheson had been a particularly dense example of the average human being. Sometimes, when dispatching other obstructions to the smooth flow of her projects, it had crossed her mind that another woman, a lesser woman, might have felt remorse for the action. In Matheson's case, not even this sneering commentary on human weakness crossed her mind. Not even a lesser woman would have hesitated to kill _him_.

_WHY DID YOU CONTACT ME?_

A slightly more interesting question. In common parlance, her new toy was taking the bait. Now to set the hook.

First, flattery.

_I WANTED TO ACKNOWLEDGE A WORTHY OPPONENT. _

Then, a challenge.

_AND SAY I'M LOOKING FORWARD TO THE NEXT TIME…_

Finally, dominance.

_… HAROLD._

_[CONNECTION TERMINATED]_

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><p>Well, there's chapter 1! This is the longest and most complex fic I've ever undertaken, so I need feedback more than ever. Please drop me a review with likesdislikes/questions/etc., I would love to hear from you!


	2. Chapter 2

This chapter takes place after the events of "Bad Code" (2.02).

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><p>Popular culture always portrayed Texas as a dusty wasteland with quaint ranchhouses dotted miles apart, but then reality and popular culture rarely matched. Root pulled the car smoothly up to the curb in her sleepy old neighborhood and watched intently as the uniformed crime scene ants scurried around the house.<p>

She had never known where to search for Hanna's body. It remained the one loose end of the whole matter, and so her smile was genuine when she called John to thank him. His disapproving voice admonished her for her actions, but it was surely a front; Harold would have done the same, and he clearly loved Harold.

She had not done nearly the damage she could have, really. She had given Mr. Russell two whole years of happiness, just living his life as if he had never kidnapped and killed a fourteen-year-old girl. Yes, it had been to sweeten the pleasure of his death, but in that case, they could both be called winners. However, she _was_ the only one still alive, and that might be called victory more than anything else.

After the body had been removed in its black plastic bag, she drove slowly around the neighborhood, counting the houses and sidewalk cracks to get back to her childhood home. She had unwrapped her first computer there, an 'accidental' delivery with the return papers mysteriously missing. Her mother merely shrugged and said "God provides," but her eyes narrowed a bit as her slippers shuffled off down the hall laminate. She always dusted around the computer, and avoided speaking to her daughter when she was using it.

Of course, Root had spent most of her time at home on the computer. Bishop was nearly empty of interesting things, that part pop culture had gotten right; the internet connection offered her a dizzyingly wide array of new attractions. Sam's mother never questioned how Sam facilitated the machine's apparent connection to the outside world. She rarely questioned the burgeoning mastermind at all in those teen years, merely sighed and expressed ad infinitum a wish that Sam would spend more time outside the house. Even that came with a tinge of apprehension, though; Sam could see the uncertainty in her mother's eyes when her quiet child turned into a social butterfly around others, albeit a somewhat malicious butterfly that always got what she wanted. She had seen Sam's imitation of human behavior for what it was, a ruse, and although neither spoke of it, the years between Hanna's and her mother's death had been ones in which the buffer around her, the one that kept others out and away, developed out of her mother's quiet fear.

Once, Sam's mother had told the smiling ladies at church that her daughter's first language was computer, not English. She was half proud and half exasperated, for once displaying none of her usual judgment for her alien daughter. The pastel women gave her sympathetic looks and one said, "she'll be speaking Boy soon, I'll bet!" shaking Sam's shoulder. Sam had given a tight smile and gestured to the coffee and donuts waiting in the vestibule, taking her mother's casual nod as permission to leave the situation.

Root had learned to speak Boy, and Girl, and Woman, and Man, but not in a way of which those church women would have approved. It had been lucky that her mother died when she did; despite her careful discretion, the town's whispers and pointed glances had only grown louder and more numerous during her last years in Bishop. With her mother's death she cut the last tie to the high-horse town and ran headlong to New York. Like a whirlpool, the underworld to which she gave herself a bloody introduction tended to swallow up newcomers and spit their twisted bodies out onto harsh pavement. She avoided this fate by sinking to the bottom of the maelstrom and changing its currents to suit her own purposes. She manipulated killers, smooth-talkers, thieves, and addicts with ease, hacking with brutal finesse to achieve her ends. The end of those golden years was just now heralding a new era of intrigue in the form of a more perfect being: the Machine.

All this passed like cleansing wildfire through Root's mind, her whole history, stretching through her memory center and strutting off down her spine like the buildings that bled together as they streaked past her car windows. The corner store, the post office, the church in which she had ceased to believe in a higher power; all markers for some forgotten ancestor called Samantha Groves.

Even the old gas station persisted, though it leaned to the right, a dusty cowboy of legend ready at a moment's notice to draw his pistol. Root whipped her car into the space near the pump. The station had not succumbed to the siren call of self-service pumps, and she drummed her black-painted fingernails on the worn leather wheel impatiently. The familiar sound of boots crunching gravel rounded the car and stopped at her rolled-down window.

"What can I do for you, ma'am?" Root peered up through long batting eyelashes, a hint of her original accent seeping through the patina of New York speech like groundwater.

"Just fill her up, please." He nodded smartly and turned on a spurred heel toward the back of the car. Root stuck her head out the window into the afternoon heat, letting it strike down on her dark hair as she admired the station worker's arms in rolled denim sleeves.

"Maybe you could get the windshield too, Joe," was her next drawled suggestion.

He glanced down at the pocket of his faded shirt with a smile, shaking his head. "Actually, it's Evan. Joe is the owner." Root recalled a stooping, weather-beaten man who always spat out tobacco juice to punctuate his rambling sentences.

"Sorry about that. Evan." He nodded goodnaturedly and next appeared at the front of the car with a cloth and wiper. She gracefully climbed out of the car to lean languidly against the driver's side door.

"Is it just me, or is it hot even for Bishop?" Root tilted her head up. The cloudless blue sky marched empty for miles in all directions, and she stared with unfocused eyes at nothing in particular.

"We've had a hot one, that's for sure," her companion agreed. "So you've been to Bishop before?" He paused in his soaping of the windshield, and Root turned a smiling face to him.

"As a kid," she explained carelessly. He had ceased soaping and was now wiping the glass down with a practiced hand.

"Just visiting, then? What brings you?" His rough voice was that of a hundred boys and men that had crowded her child- and young adulthood, interchangeable and extremely forgettable, but it brought more Texan unbidden to her tongue.

"Business," was the short reply, but a ghost of her mother made an unprompted and rare appearance in the back of her mind, urging her to elaborate, to 'talk to the gentleman.' "I'm here from New York on business."

"Yeah? Had some other New Yorkers here yesterday. Y'all here together?" In a town as small as Bishop, questions like this were not nearly as ridiculous as they would have been anywhere else.

"Tall Neanderthal?" Root queried with amusement. The worker's confused squint prompted her to try again. "Tall guy in a suit?"

He nodded, understanding now. "Yes, ma'am, that's the one. And a black woman. Some kind of police detective, is she?"

Root nodded her perky assent. "Those are the ones."

"Then you're here about the Frey girl," he replied with approving surety. He had finished the windshield and rounded the front left bumper to lean a respectful distance down the door from Root. He flipped the wet cloth on his faded blue jeans, disregarding the wet stripes it left in its wake to evaporate in the heat.

Root raised her eyebrows flirtatiously. "And how would you know that?"

"Got a friend down at the station house, heard the sheriff wasn't too pleased with your friends' manners." He grinned good-naturedly to show he meant no harm by his words, and Root smiled back.

"That sounds like them all right."

He looked down in thought, then back up at Root. "Heard they found that girl in the librarian's patio." Root's smile shifted to a more conspiratorial grin as she leaned in and lowered her voice.

"You may have heard right," she confided, "but that's about all I can say." He nodded once, satisfied. Root leaned back against the car door, looking to her left at the handle protruding from the gas tank.

"I think it's full. Do I pay inside?"

"No, ma'am, right here's fine if it's cash." He un-leant himself from the door and craned his neck to note the numbers on the antique pump. "$52.68." Root opened the car door and pulled out her wallet, counting out three twenties.

"Keep the change." She climbed up into the car and smiled out the window at the worker even as she pulled away. She saw his relaxed wave in the rearview mirror, and her gaze followed him until he turned and sauntered back into the station.

The drive back to the airport was monotonously full of uniform one-and-a-half-story homes sliding into rolling fields and endless sun. Her mind wandered to other matters, and she arrived at the rental lot in what seemed like minutes.

Light luggage and few accessories made quick work of the security line, something that Root had perfected over the ten years since her first plane trip. The heavy stasis of waiting was nearly interminable, but as she settled into her first-class seat she was finally able to open her computer and pull up a file folder that was simply called 'Her.' The information flowed freely from her mind, through her fingers, and onto the bright screen, following the ever-running bar marking her place in the document.

_Harold Finch—designer, leader_

_John Reese—pet, muscle_

A quick search of the NYPD's duty roster and work hours for the last week yielded the most likely candidate for the next name.

_Jocelyn Carter—police detective_

Each name linked to another document, full of information, job and personal histories, credits reports, newspaper articles, confidential files from the upper echelons of the intelligence community. These yielded links to a dozen more covering the main aspects of Finch's little operation.

As she tapped out more information about the newest known member of Finch's team, Root smiled. The suited monkey might think that he had ended Root's encounters with his employer, but Harold was more intelligent than that. New York to Maryland, Denton Weeks' connection to the Machine, all of these reminders that a preponderance of information and knowledge of the weak spots in humanity would lead her directly to what she wanted most. He had to recognize the opening gambit of a long game, even if he could not yet know the inevitable outcome that Root foresaw. Though this move had failed, Root's patience was infinite and her skills vast; it was impossible that she should be kept from the god-like Machine for long.

Even as the flight attendant's electronic voice warned the passengers of their imminent arrival and asked politely that they stow their devices, Root saved the last file she had been editing. She created a new folder within the larger one and added all the files pertaining to the events of the last few months.

"I'm sorry, ma'am, I'm going to have to ask you to turn that off." Root's winning smile to the beleaguered attendant banished all remnants of Texas when she spoke.

"One moment, I just need to save this. I'd hate for the boss's report to be deleted," she giggled. She glanced down the aisle briefly to the squalling child in economy class. "Don't worry, I'll put it away," she whispered sympathetically. The flight attendant threw her a grateful look and bustled off.

Just before shutting the computer down, she typed a name into the folder heading: _Opening Moves. _

Ten minutes later, the plane landed with a whump and a pressure along the seatbelt holding Root in her seat. Even though others jumped up and grabbed at bags and purses, she remained seated for a moment. In the bubble of quiet that she projected around herself, she smiled. She was back in New York. Now the mid-game could begin.

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><p>I don't really know what this is. I'm trying to get more insight into Root as an independent person, but part of her character is that she adapts and changes depending on who she's interacting with, so the actual woman behind the masks is hard to pin down. Later chapters will try to remove the masks a bit and expand on her character. Thanks for reading, and please leave reviews! I'd love to hear your thoughts and ideas!<p> 


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